[...] Japanese fast-food has found a way to bypass the cultural stigmas that impede their profits. One food chain noticed many women would not buy their biggest-sized burgers. The culprit was ochobo, a Japanese custom that prevents women from opening their mouth widely in public. Small mouths are considered beautiful and opening them widely is considered “ugly” and “rude.” The restaurant concluded that it would get into the business of “freeing women from the spell of ‘ochobo.’”

Thanks to Dr. Lisa Wade over at Sociological Images for the pic and commentary.

“Dieting is for women.

I mean we all know that dieting and women go together like peas and carrots. We know this — collectively and together, even if we don’t agree that it should be this way – not because it’s inevitable or natural, but because we constantly get reminded that women should be on diets and dieting is a feminine activity.”

I keep telling myself, “Arbourist, you need to post more stuff you write as opposed to other things gleaned from the net”. The problem is that the net has a lot of awesome on it that does it better than I. Consider Sociological Images. They present a concept, concisely explain said concept and then reinforce the learning with a spot-on video. SI, you do are doing it right. From SI:

As usual Sociological Images is chock-full of interesting articles. I was intrigued by the title of this post and decided to reproduce it in part here for the benefit of my readership. While you are there, check out the article on how cheerleading outfits are shrinking over time.

“You might be surprised to learn that at its inception in the mid-1800s cheerleading was an all-male sport. Characterized by gymnastics, stunts, and crowd leadership, cheerleading was considered equivalent in prestige to an American flagship of masculinity, football. As the editors of Nation saw it in 1911: